Security is not convenient. That’s probably why the CDK, by default, uses AdministratorAccess Policy to deploy resources. But we can easily change it and increase the security of our AWS account, following the least privilege principle with a minimal additional burden.
Until recently, I was skeptical about the AWS CDK. I believe in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), but with the “code” being YAML. But after using CDK in real projects, the amount of heavy lifting it does and the vast reduction of a boilerplate code changed my view.
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Have you ever been stuck deciding between SQS, SNS, Kinesis Streams, and EventBridge? Struggled to pick the right one for your use case? If the answer is “yes”, I’ve got you covered with a simple decision tree to help you make the right decision.
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In need to backup my personal files in the cloud, I wrote a script that archives the data into the Amazon S3 bucket. After some fine-tuning and solving a bunch of edge-cases, it’s limited mainly by the disk read and my internet upload speed. And it costs me only $3.70 per TiB per month.
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The simplicity of setting up a Kinesis trigger for a Lambda function may be deceptive. There are pitfalls that can cause problems we will spot only later, in the production environment. I learned about some of them the hard way, so let’s say I speak from the experience.
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Can you have a website with a CMS on AWS and not pay just for its existence? I looked at Amazon Lightsail, headless WordPress, and Webiny CMS but found none of those suitable. So I choose Prismic – a SaaS headless CMS, and Gatsby to create the site. Yes, I needed to make a pipeline to build my website after content changes. But when I did it, I got a website with CMS hosted at no cost.
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AWS can overwhelm with the number of services. Especially if multiple services seem to do a very similar job. Let’s look at the cloud-native AWS messaging services – the SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge. What are the differences and when to use which one?
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There are two reasons to optimize AWS Lambda functions performance. First is money – you pay for the Lambda execution duration. The quicker you do the job, the less you pay. The second is latency – the quicker you do the job, the shorter your client waits for the result. It’s a known fact that the decrease of latency improves sales, user engagement, and client satisfaction – so we could argue it’s also the money, in the end.
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The new version of AWS SDK for JavaScript / TypeScript / Node.js came with a few significant improvements. But does “General Availability” mean “ready for the production”? How to use it? And how to unit test our code using it? Let’s take a look at it.
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Logging in AWS Lambda functions is simple. You just print the message, and it’s sent to the CloudWatch Logs. And everything is fine until you get a surprisingly big bill for the CloudWatch usage, or you need to actually debug some live system. Here are my tips for logging in AWS Lambda, based on my experience with real-live, big-scale functions running on production.
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